What I’m Doing This Summer

A Message to My Readers

That’s me on the far left visiting a gallery in Chelsea earlier this month with three Substack superstars: (left to right) Thomas Brown, Andras Kisery, and James Tussing.

Just a quick note on what I’m up to while my summer fiction project is in progress.

Right now I’m working on turning my historical novel about the desert monks of Roman Egypt into a longish tale or novella suitable for publication in one or two parts on Substack. Reducing the novel to less than a third of its length requires a good deal of rewriting. I’m hoping the shorter and more heavily narrated form will give the work something of the speed, urgency, and thematic clarity of the fiction of Heinrich von Kleist, which is what inspired this experiment. Looking forward to sharing the result with you sometime this winter.

I plan to resume publishing here in September with sort of a follow-up to my last couple of posts but one, which examined the relationship between Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. In the next post, God willing, I’ll turn to Wilde’s relationship with Beardsley’s friend and coeval, the writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm. In particular, I want to present an extraordinary and little-seen work of Beerbohm’s that, with the exception of a recent auction-house catalogue, I believe to be unknown to scholarship. It’s an item that sheds light not only on the artist’s own association with Wilde but also the intention behind Beardsley’s notorious illustrations of Salomé.

In the meantime, in a Substack newsletter specially set up for the purpose that requires a separate free subscription if you want to follow the installments as they come out, I’ve been posting my summer fiction project: Casual Encounters, a comic novel in the form of a series of interlocking monologues and dialogues set in NewYork City circa 2008. I have said here before that it’s about the utopian promise of Craigslist personals in that bygone era, but that isn’t really true. It may be better to say it’s about certain rather specialized longings and the paradoxes that arise when one desires not an object but a subject with desires of his or her own. Yet neither formulation is likely to give you any clear idea of the work.

So if you’re curious, I’d urge you to try the latest installment linked below. It’s a self-contained story—no set-up needed—and what can I say? It’s really terrific.

11: Gil